Social Media for Musicians

This is a guest post from Brian Casel, a web designer at CasJam Media serving small businesses in need of a strong online presence. Become a fan on Facebook! In his spare time, he writes and records music for picture.

Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube, Myspace… Oh how the times they are a changin’ for the working musician. Today’s music scene isn’t what it used to be. Or is it?

Back in the day, a new artist or band starting out had to build their following one fan at a time. But now with the magic of the social web, we don’t have to worry about all that hustle anymore, right?

Wrong.

Social media requires you (yes you!) to be personally involved, every day. It’s not something that can be automated or pushed to the side. By its very essence, it requires you to socialize, reach out to others, and engage, engage, engage!

The new music scene is still about winning over your audience one fan at a time. Only now, that age-old word-of-mouth effect can spread 1000 times faster.

So what am I talking about exactly?

Let’s start with Facebook. It’s the most popular form of social media today. You can start by posting daily status messages broadcasting the latest news about your music or your career. Respond and drop comments on your friends or fans pages. Join a Facebook group related to your topic of interest (your musical genre? Local music scene?). But don’t just browse. Get in on the conversation. Put yourself out there.

Now lets talk Twitter. If you’re still not on the Twitter train, check out this article I wrote about using Twitter to promote your business or brand, where I explain the all-important “re-tweet”. Use Twitter to direct traffic to your other social media profiles: Your Facebook page, your blog, your YouTube videos, your music on Myspace, etc.

But there’s a catch.

There’s always a catch. And this is it: You must build trust. People will not follow you on Twitter, fan/friend you Facebook, watch your YouTube videos, or read your blog posts if they don’t know you as being a reliable source of interesting / click-worthy content.

So how do you build trust? It’s simple. Be real. Be human. Engage in real conversations and offer real responses. Do not make every tweet, status message, forum post, or blog comment a self-promoting link. Those are OK sometimes, but they should only be a small percentage of your output. The rest can be interesting, noteworthy, funny, relevant comments. Or they can be click-worthy links to other content you find on the web such as an interesting article, a great song, a funny video, etc.

Use Twitter Search (search.twitter.com) to seek out folks who tweeting about things you’re interested in. Follow as many of them as possible, and you will get quite a few follow-backs. Then engage, engage, engage!

Just don’t forget to step outside and meet real people in real places. That’s kind of important too.

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